A Place in History

Boston is a city where history has already happened. The shots heard ’round the world, which Patriots’ Day commemorates, were fired in Lexington and Concord two hundred and thirty-eight years ago. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested almost a century ago, and electrocuted in Charlestown prison, in 1927. The last curses and rocks of the busing crisis were hurled in South Boston in the late nineteen-seventies. After that, Boston largely withdrew from the world stage and settled comfortably into its eternities: its teams, its universities, its terrible drivers, its brick landmarks, its aggrieved enclaves, its red maples.

Those traditions have given the city a certain insularity. Boston belongs to families that have been there longer than Fenway Park, and to students and tourists, but on a temporary basis—they’re just passing through. People boast of being New Yorkers after living here for just a few months, but you can spend years, or even decades, in Boston without feeling like a Bostonian. The city has a thousand charms, but it has always been easier to like than to love.

Every year, though, one day is different: Marathon Monday. America’s and the world’s runners come to Boston, and Boston welcomes them ecstatically. Training for a marathon is the loneliest experience in all of sports, and long-distance runners are existential beings, compounded of stamina and frail flesh. For months, they focus on themselves obsessively, selfishly—mileage, splits, shoes, shin splints, carbs. In mid-April, they converge on Boston, where, later than points south, the daffodils and tulips are coming into bloom. On the morning of Patriots’ Day, the gun goes off in Hopkinton, and, as the solid mass of solitary souls makes its way past the starting line on the eastward journey to Copley Square, the runners begin to learn that the Boston Marathon is not for individualists.

Crowds are thin through the western suburbs of Ashland and Natick, but in Wellesley the students stand five deep, yelling at the top of their lungs as they offer kisses to passing runners, and when the climb through Newton burns up the last of the runners’ glycogen, leaving only meagre fat for energy, they’re pulled up Heartbreak Hill by the spectators’ cheers. The closer the runners get to Boston and the beacon of the Pru, the bigger and more essential the crowds become. Instead of fading inward with exhaustion during the last miles, runners extend themselves, reaching out for encouragement, joining their will to that of the crowd, until, with the final turn onto Boylston Street, a great roar carries them home. Boston is never so open, generous, and happy as it is on that stretch of Boylston on the third Monday of April.

The crude shrapnel bombs that exploded twelve seconds apart at 2:50 P.M. last Monday, on the sidewalk just yards from the finish line, were designed to shred muscle and shatter bone. This they did, with terrible efficiency. If the killers also meant to crush the spirit, “they picked the wrong city to do it,” President Obama proclaimed, at a memorial service in Boston three days later. The two brothers who apparently planted the bombs may have planned on big crowds and the attention of global media, but they didn’t figure on the solidarity that defines Boston on Marathon day. Maybe people in the vicinity of bomb blasts in any city, on any day, would rush toward, not away from, the carnage and the danger. Or maybe not. It shouldn’t be surprising that so many did it in that city on that day.

In the minutes, hours, and days after the blast, everything seemed to work. People knelt on the pavement and used belts or scraps of clothing to tie off tourniquets and prevent the maimed from bleeding to death. A pediatric resident who had almost finished the race jumped over the barricades and evaded the police to tend to victims. Volunteers instantly transformed the medical tent behind the finish line into a triage station. A man who had lost his own son in the Iraq War rushed a young man whose lower legs had been blown off to the tent, and so kept another father from losing his son. Reporters and photographers covering the end of the race instantly turned into war correspondents and captured indelible stories and images. Ambulances made their way through the chaotic streets in minutes. Staff at Boston’s hospitals quickly and methodically prepared to receive mass casualties and began operating on the injured within half an hour of the blasts, preventing any more deaths after the first, tragic three. And on Thursday the F.B.I. and the local authorities, aided by a description provided by the young man who had lost his lower legs, were on the verge of breaking the case, when the killers decided to come out shooting.

Since we live in a period when many things in America don’t work, it’s almost strange to find so many institutions and individuals meeting our highest standards. The bravery, humanity, and sheer competence of people in Boston recalled London during the Blitz, or New York on September 11th. Perhaps Americans have been mentally preparing to deal with an atrocity of this sort ever since that day. The wonder is that it took so long.

“We finish the race,” the President said at the memorial service. “We finish the race. And we do that because of who we are. And we do that because we know that somewhere around the bend a stranger has a cup of water. Around the bend somebody’s there to boost our spirits. On that toughest mile, just when we think that we’ve hit a wall, someone will be there to cheer us on and pick us up if we fall.” With too much practice, the President has become magnificent at healing Americans’ spirits.

But policies and the institutions of government remain broken, and President Obama seems powerless to repair them. Last week, when Bostonians were showing such courage, senators in Washington cowered before the gun lobby and blocked passage of the most basic provisions—provisions supported by an overwhelming majority of the public—to diminish the gun violence to which more and more Americans, especially young men, are prone. This is a race that the federal government seems unable even to start. Meanwhile, owing to sequestration, the F.B.I.’s overwhelmed Boston office faces the possibility of manpower cuts of up to twenty per cent.

By the end of the week, with bomb victims still fighting for their lives in emergency wards, and the entire metropolitan area on lockdown, history had returned to Boston, and the city was easy to love. A man named Ian wrote in an e-mail, “Although I have lived in this area for almost thirty years, I haven’t necessarily thought of myself as a Bostonian. Although I think Boston is a nice enough city in which to live, I’ve never really been connected to it as a whole community. I like the parts I like, and I don’t like the parts I don’t like. In terms of attitude, I often identify more with the people of San Francisco or New York than with those of Boston. But when the marathon bombers struck, I took it personally. They attacked my city. I felt a real kinship, a real connection with the people of Boston, all the people of Boston. And I realized that I don’t just live here. This is my home.” ♦